More Microsoft Mesh: Apple takes a bite
Got this email yesterday, and I feel it’s pretty telling of the Mesh that Microsoft is finding itself in (not printed in its entirety): “We are Gold Certified with Microsoft with specializations in OEM, IW and Mobility. Our goal for 2008 was to shed the certification and convert the majority of revenues in consumer and SMB [...]
Got this email yesterday, and I feel it’s pretty telling of the Mesh that Microsoft is finding itself in (not printed in its entirety):
“We are Gold Certified with Microsoft with specializations in OEM, IW and Mobility. Our goal for 2008 was to shed the certification and convert the majority of revenues in consumer and SMB space from Windows to Mac OS X.
…
Microsoft is clearly no longer interested in being a desktop company. We have found the Apple solutions more profitable with its users both buying more peripherals and opting for the more expensive models.”
This is one of the largest independent OEMs around, I even bought my first computer with my own paycheck from this company. Over the years as both our companies grew I got to know the CEO and as far as Microsoft fanboys go, this dude makes Steve Clayton look like a Linux hippie convinced that Microsoft is the devil. For him to initiate a platform switch… man.
Microsoft has a problem, the evil problem. They seem to be looking to pick a fight with everyone while the bread and butter of its partners is allowed to fall apart under the now pirate treasure that the sunk Vista ship has become. People are starting to figure out that there is a company out there dedicated to their experience on the desktop and they are enjoying it enough (oh, just f’n shoot me for what I’m about to say) that even thought it is not designed for business they demand and push it be included. Apple is bridging the desktop PC, office PC divide.
Microsoft has turned its back on its partners, which bring in most of its revenues. Now the partners are starting to turn their back on Microsoft. Makes one wonder, if its worth sacrificing the existing multibillion dollar platform for the fight with Google over search advertising, just how big is the ad market? Or is it just the case of Microsoft lacking any direction and focus?
Poor Steve…. I imagine if any of the bigger clients ever sat him down and reenacted the Office Space scene: “What would you say you DO here?”
(P.S. Reason why is really written well in Brian Williams blog post that I can’t seem to find. If anyone reading this has the Vista branding problem post he wrote please post it in the comments).
NOLA - Lil’ Pimpin’ The New Orleans ITPRO SBS Swing Migration starts tomorrow, I am sorry that I can’t be there with so many of my friends and MVP family. I have received enough emails telling me that the pimp hat will be missed, asking what I’m up to and why I’m not out and about.. so, here is [...]
The New Orleans ITPRO SBS Swing Migration starts tomorrow, I am sorry that I can’t be there with so many of my friends and MVP family. I have received enough emails telling me that the pimp hat will be missed, asking what I’m up to and why I’m not out and about.. so, here is a preview, the next generation of software pimp:
I’m sorry I can’t join you folks, but I have sent one of my guys to meet some of our partners and get some feedback on what we’re doing here. His name is Billy Gibbons (yes, from ZZ Top!) so he should be pretty easy to spot. Ask him for stuff, he has a ton of shirts and iPods.
The "Howard Cunningham" Feature One of the most important things I did with Shockey Monkey is to pick up the phone and call around the people that really had the whole SMB IT business figured out. If you are going to copy someone, you should copy the best, right? Howard Cunningham is a widely respected Connectwise guru, not to mention [...]
One of the most important things I did with Shockey Monkey is to pick up the phone and call around the people that really had the whole SMB IT business figured out. If you are going to copy someone, you should copy the best, right?
Howard Cunningham is a widely respected Connectwise guru, not to mention one of the biggest supporters Own Web Now has ever had. Howard’s company services the Washington DC area and he works with a ton of other partners that need help with their clients DC offices - so I figured who better to talk to about ticket exports and sharing between portal than the man himself.
And being the bastard that I am, I had to ask him what he hated about his current software. One thing you learn about people and software is that the passion and frustration tend to go hand in hand - as much as you love something, you are at your wits end with the other things. So Howard shared a feature request with me that really fits in with the way that nearly all the successful IT shops out there do, and that is:
Everything is logged in the portal. EVERYTHING. It is logged when its done. If its not in the portal, it does not get done. If time is not in the portal, you do not get paid for the time.
Everyone I spoke to said that.�
(click to zoom)
Well, when you are expected to log everything and note as you go, sometimes you will find yourself without connectivity. Or a laptop. Or the mobile device signal. Or 3 acres deep in a data center 
Sometimes you will need to send an email directly from the portal. But how do you do that?
Well, with Shockey Monkey 2 there is an “hc” link next to the contact, click on it and the UI displays the new message window. It takes your information, allows you to provide a CC, BCC, change subject, message, everything except the attachment.
Where in the world would I use…
This is the other thing you get when you’re writing software - sometimes the feedback makes no sense to you. Why would you need a new message dialog inside of a portal, why not just open Outlook or OWA or?
- Sometimes you are at a client site and using their computer. You don’t want to connect to your own server just to send a message.
- Sometimes you are at a computer that doesn’t have Outlook or you use Outlook Web Access so copying and pasting email and ticket information from one web browser into another is just not the best use of your time.
- Sometimes you are at a shared PC / kiosk and you don’t want to put up with the 28.8 baud modem usually attached to those devices.
Made enough sense to me, so its built into SM 2. You can thank Howard for the feature.
Dear Vlad, where is my audience? Please feel free to drop me an email at vlad@vladville.com if something I write here ever strikes your interest and you feel further exploration would help others. I’ll take them from time to time and write longer pieces. Relatively influential person in our space recently started blogging and found some frustration with his apparent lack of [...]
Please feel free to drop me an email at vlad@vladville.com if something I write here ever strikes your interest and you feel further exploration would help others. I’ll take them from time to time and write longer pieces.
Relatively influential person in our space recently started blogging and found some frustration with his apparent lack of popularity (snipped for focus):
“.. where is my audience? .. I get some traffic but no comments and no feedback.”
First of all, you are thinking about this way too hard.
Blogging, and all sincere communication, is easy. Just talk like you would to any of your friends, family, coworkers and partners. Some people will choose to listen to you, others will not. Do you get angry or frustrated in the lack of friends and associates that want to spend time with you during weekdays? Of course not. So why change it for the web?
Sincere communication is easy. It’s just you. Insincere communication (marketing, PR, deceptive copy writing, provocative stunts for sake of attention) is hard, and more often than not they will backfire on you. So just don’t bother. Think about it, what do you do when the sales people bug you in the retail store? You thank them for their time, say you’re just lurking and walk around/away from them. How about the jerks that only talk about themselves and their conquests? It’s amusing for a little while but eventually you ignore them.
Same with the web. People subscribe and follow people who can captivate their attention and offer up an opinion. If you don’t happen to have an opinion, then why should I bother listening to you? Imagine if the homeless guy in front of your office blocked you from your office in the morning and insisted on reading the newspaper to you, out loud, all while mispronouncing the words. Imagine getting stuck for an hour on the highway behind a car with 8,000 bumper stickers - My honor student, my Chevy, my political views, etc.�
Blogging, conversations, sharing in general is an act of putting a spotlight on an issue - personally - because you have something more to add. Another angle, more facts, explaining the circumstances. That is why we talk to one another in real life, the web just enriches and makes the communication medium more effortless and accessible.
Write to enrich yourself and you may do well. Write to gloat and selfpromote/sell and you will certainly fail. If you are so concerned about your audience, what it may think of you, and how you could make money off it then stop stabbing in the dark, just ask. Remember that the most important opinion is that of the people that already care about what you have to say.
The "Karl Palachuk" Feature One thing nearly all small businesses suck at is documentation of their inventory and processes. Unless they are a major chain managed and operated retail outfit, their documentation consists of postits and invoices kept somewhere by someone. So what is a small business more likely to value - something overpriced that they can’t understand or value [...]
One thing nearly all small businesses suck at is documentation of their inventory and processes. Unless they are a major chain managed and operated retail outfit, their documentation consists of postits and invoices kept somewhere by someone.
So what is a small business more likely to value - something overpriced that they can’t understand or value (”We defrag your Exchange store every weekend so it’s faster”) or (”We base all your technology decisions on knowing everything about your network and we’re an asset, not an expense”) - nearly all businesses have no problem paying for a cleaning crew to come through the place every night.. the same businesses that don’t want to pay for a business line T1.
So Karl says, sell them on Network Documentation.
And I shamelessly copy Karl. But many don’t. Why? It’s too hard. A document is outdated the moment that it is printed. It sits in a dusty folder on the shelf. There is a process for the process of keeping documentation.
No wonder it sucks.
Now, here is the Monkey way. Easy access, easy management, easy updates. Or so I optimistically hope. From any Shockey Monkey display select New, Documentation.
It presents the following screen to add a new document. Name and comments are self-explanatory. The email part binds the document to the particular user, it is smart and uses AJAX search to make sure the document gets associated with the right company in much the same way that your assets do.
The attachment can be marked private - hidden from the client. This is good if you are uploading documents that the clients should not be aware of or have access� to. For company eyes only you know.
Finally, where do the documents sit. Well, go to either the Company tab or the Contact tab and look under the Documentation link.
So how complex is the process of documentation management now? Well, once Karl hooks you up with the Network Documentation book, or the SLA book, or Erick’s MSP book (remember kids, theft is wrong!) and you adapt them to your business, the documentation upkeep process is simple.
- Find the company or contact you’re working with.
- Click to open the documentation from the web site.
- Save changes, upload file.
- Done.
I bet you it takes less than a minute. The documentation process magically no longer sucks anymore.
What’s more, this is something that can be sold in a number of ways. First, and most obvious one, we don’t kill a bunch of trees every time we upgrade Quickbooks for the R16th time.
Second, the data is always up to date. Where is the data? It’s under your profile in our portal. You know, that place you keep on going to so you can get our help every step of the way. That place we use to consolidate all your IT operations so we can save you money, eliminate confusion and work in an open an honest way.
The Karl way.
P.S. Always be pimping. Shameless whoring, or SMB IT leaders working together to bring you solutions designed for this market. It’s all in the perception I guess. But one thing is for sure, never ever ever take pictures with a slimy vendor when he gives you a free tshirt. You know you’re going to end up in the advertising clipart sooner than later.
Xobni, Yahoo… Ballmer deserves a raise Is it just me or does it seem like Microsoft is making all the right decisions when it comes to the takeover bids as of late? Yesterday the news that they finally gave up on Yahoo! came out, which in my humble opinion is a positive outcome for Microsoft and its users/customers. I know primary [...]
Is it just me or does it seem like Microsoft is making all the right decisions when it comes to the takeover bids as of late? Yesterday the news that they finally gave up on Yahoo! came out, which in my humble opinion is a positive outcome for Microsoft and its users/customers. I know primary interest in the Yahoo! deal was the advertising potential, but when you’re trying to “hire” an unreasonable tamper tantrum its usually better to walk away. But this post is about a little more than that.
Last week Microsoft also laid down the reality to Xobni, and basically told them that they will be swallowed up by the Outlook team and relegated to the 1.5 useful features their product delivers. They didn’t seem to like that and instead walked away from the deal to release the beta today.
It’s not that Xobni is not cool, it’s just that its not 7Mb cool. It’s just that its premise and promise fail under load in much the same way that Microsoft Outlook, Google Desktop and all the others fail when dealing with massive amounts of data. Xobni features, in no particular order, are Inbox search, ripping out contact phone numbers from email signatures, attachment tracking between contacts and the supposed social networking aspect - it takes all the people you’ve ever CC’ed together and assumes they are a social network. No, not kidding. Aside from the visual interface tricks any third grader would enjoy, the most worthwhile component to me appeared to be the attachment tracking, however, the field was not wide enough to quickly see the entire filename. I frequently have to track contracts and documents in external email threads so this would have been useful had it been designed with some common WPF components that make up the actual user experience. So even though I’ve maintained this to be a rather cool but useless addon, with the public beta release I am uninstalling it. Why? Because the 2 features I need should be a part of Outlook, not yet another bloated addin that will fail to deliver when it loads up all my data.
The reality
The Web 2.0 vapor train is coming to an end it seems and Microsoft, with its gigantic weiner, seems to be pissing them all out of their VC-induced REM sleep state.
All the Web 2.0, like .com before it, is sustained and built not on profits but hopes of profits. Smart people cash out and don’t buy into the greater fool theory, but some people like the taste of their dreams so much that they may never wake up and face the reality - in Xobni’s case, thats the fact that $20 million for 2 Outlook features is a hell of a compliment. For Yahoo!, it’s the fact that sometimes you have to work with people you don’t like because you have a common agenda, especially when there is a 500lb gorilla in the room aiming to crush you.
But companies grow up, they wake up, they learn. Moral of the story being, dreaming of money is nice, having money in the bank is even nicer.
As for Ballmer, there is speculation that he may be asked to step down. If anything, he deserves a raise for being up front. Microsoft has a long reputation of being an evin, ruthless, throwing chairs behind the closed door, strongarming company. The recent press releases show a far more open, process-oriented CEO than the videos and keynotes portray.
Now… how about some of that $33/share being invested back into the company for rapid development of features tied to the actual products people pay for and run their companies with?
Another community resource bites the dust May 7, ‘08: Funboard, R.I.P. Funny thing is that just the other day I got an email regarding Karl’s podcast which in a nutshell said: “You are all alike. You throw together something great just to get an audience and sell your stuff, then when you figure out we aren’t stupid enough to buy your crappy books [...]
May 7, ‘08: Funboard, R.I.P.
Funny thing is that just the other day I got an email regarding Karl’s podcast which in a nutshell said:
“You are all alike. You throw together something great just to get an audience and sell your stuff, then when you figure out we aren’t stupid enough to buy your crappy books you shut off and disappear for weeks hoping nobody notices.”
The support street goes both ways folks…. I guess we’ll avoid that street until all thats left is a subscription based Susan Bradley twitter account.
It’s good to be missed, but… Getting a lot of mail (and guilt) about not being in New Orleans this weekend for the awesome Swing Migration NOLA conference. I spoke at the event last year and really enjoyed the parties, believe me, I wish I could have made it. Ditto for the SMB Summit with SMBTN. I wish I could have [...]
Getting a lot of mail (and guilt) about not being in New Orleans this weekend for the awesome Swing Migration NOLA conference. I spoke at the event last year and really enjoyed the parties, believe me, I wish I could have made it. Ditto for the SMB Summit with SMBTN. I wish I could have made it. Hanging out with peers and exchanging ideas is what drives all of our businesses forward. It is also one of the more enjoyable parts of the business.
However, it is not the only or even close to the top of the most important parts of running a business.
In the long long ago, all Little Vlad wanted to do was to run the cool little bells and whistles that power an ISP. But nobody with their right mind would let me do that. So I started building one on my own. I went to college. I got a CS degree. I got a business degree. I designed a network. I designed software. I hired people. I cut deals. I worked my tail off. I learned from the best. I went and met and worked with everyone I could, all over the world.
I built a successful, profitable company.
And I am loving it. Honestly, I can’t imagine doing anything but what I do all day long. I get to deal with some of the most expensive and most complex infrastructure available. When I get bored of that, I go back and work on the software. When I get bored of that, I talk to my partners, get ideas, turn those ideas and feedback into something that makes everyone more successful. We all grow more.
To me, business success is in enjoying and being excited about your business.
Why would I want to spend time away from it? The conference and road life is hard. I hate being away from my home, my wife, my dog.. and now the baby too. Moreover, conferences have a dense political motive behind them where you are always offending people that you turn down. I have been fortunate enough to be recognized as both a business and technology leader that if I so choose I could spend 364 days a year on the road. Not just that, but the obligations of being a vendor whore - I am always being invited to be a part of this focus group, and that council and this advisory group and that exam review board and this conference planning committee and…
… and while all those are a tremendous honor and a blessing, I just love my life and my company too much to separate myself from it that much. I have been fortunate to meet so many of you on the road, gain some wonderful friendships, get a great reputation in this segment…. and I just hope you understand that as a single human being I can only do so much and be in so many places at once. It’s not a personal thing, it’s not even a business thing.. I just hope nobody is offended at that, even though the emails indicate otherwise.
If you’re pissed, have a drink in my name. One thing I can promise is that we’ll always be represented by someone in the community that will pick up the tab.
Enjoy your humble pie I don’t know if I’m just an ass or if everyone else does this but Alice really put a smile on my face this morning: Now go away before I replace your job with a php script.
I don’t know if I’m just an ass or if everyone else does this but Alice really put a smile on my face this morning:
Now go away before I replace your job with a php script.
Jim Harsch is one of only four agents in Park City that has both the Certified Luxury Home Marketing Specialist (CLHMS) designation and is a member of the Million Dollar Guild as certified by The Institute for Luxury Home Marketing.
Salt Lake City, UT recently was ranked #6 on the Forbes.com list of America’s Recession-Proof Cities. The median home price rose 2.5% from fourth quarter of 2006 through the 4th quarter of 2007. Unemployment was up slightly to 3.1% and key growth was in the education and health service areas at 5.5%. The state is creating jobs, but not as quickly as the labor force is growing.
My GCSE exams are coming up, which i’m fairly confident about, but i really do not care what i get in them :/